Alec Baldwin and the Year in Getting Kicked Off Airplanes

Alec Baldwin is just the latest in a string of people kicked off airplanes this year. Here are some year-in-review highlights.

Alec Baldwin is just the latest in a string of people kicked off airplanes this year. In an era when a wayward glance or curled lip aboard an aircraft can earn you a security escort right back from whence you came, it's no surprise that 2011 saw its fair share of aircraft ejections. What are some of the more absurd infractions that'll earn you a first-class upgrade to the airport clink? Here are some year-in-review highlights:

Less than 24 hours before that, country singer and Celebrity Apprentice winner John Rich was thrown off a Southwest Airlines flight in Las Vegas after the airline determined he was too tanked to fly.

Down in West Palm Beach, meanwhile, three women—all strangers—were also removed from an AirTran flight on Monday following an altercation with a flight attendant. The short of it: The passengers claim that the surly steward improperly handled the first woman's baggage; when she complained, she was escorted off the plane. The second woman says she was booted off for requesting a new seat because her assigned one was broken. The third woman, coming to the defense of the first two women, says she was ejected simply for standing up against what she perceived was an unfair treatment of her fellow passengers. When it came down to it, the attendant told the pilot it was him or the passengers—but someone had to go; the pilot chose the attendant. Now Southwest, the parent company for AirTran, is doing a whole back-pedal song-and-dance, to the amusement of pretty much no one.

The L Word's Leisha Hailey was also escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight from Baltimore to St. Louis for kissing her girlfriend, which fellow passengers reportedly described as an "excessive" display of affection.

August

French actor Gérard Depardieu was accused of peeing on the floor of a CityJet airline cabin, in view of his fellow passengers, after a crew member told him he needed to wait to use the toilet until after take-off. The Air France-KLM subsidiary made a joke of the incidence afterward, tweeting: "As you may have seen on the news, we are busy mopping the floor of one of our planes this morning…" Depardieu, in his defense, said he couldn't hold himself any longer and tried to aim as much of the stream as possible into an empty Evian bottle.

July

Two sisters flying from Oakland to Dallas to visit their ailing father (he'd just had a heart attack), were ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight after crying and asking a passing flight attendant for a glass of wine. The airline called it a misunderstanding, put the sisters up at a hotel, and got them on another flight.

Miami photographer Sandy DeWitt is ejected from a US Airways flight departing Philadelphia after snapping a photo of an employee's name tag with her iPhone. She says she took the photo so she could later report the employee's rude behavior toward passengers in the boarding area; the employee allegedly viewed the woman as a "security threat."

Also this month, a JetBlue attendant waggled his walkie-talkie antenna between Malinda Knowles’s legs, imploring her to lift her shirt and prove she was wearing shorts. She was forced to leave the plane, show her bottoms, and then allowed back on the flight from West Palm Beach to New York.

A Pakistani-American Muslim woman wearing a hijab was deplaned in San Diego from a San Jose-bound flight, operated by Southwest, after a flight attendant claimed she heard the woman whisper "It's a go" into her cell phone. The passenger claims she said "I have to go"; the Council on American-Islamic Relations-California is currently suing the airline on the woman's behalf.